Project Oversight

'Jurassic Arena' has been designed from the ground up as primarily an interactive showcase not just a game, at its core it serves as a virtual portfolio. Showcasing an array of skills that have been developed over the course of my studies at SAE, hard surface modelling, animation, unreal coding as well as world building and environmental story telling.

The ultimate purpose of any portfolio piece is weather it be beauty renders, animation show reels, or in this case an interactive showcase is to find employment, to demonstrate to an employer that I am the best person for the job. As a student quickly approaching the end of their studies, finding employment in my chosen field is becoming an all consuming endeavour filling me with both anxiety and excitement.

According to the Project Management Institute (1969), project stakeholders are defined as:

“Individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or successful project completion.”

In other words, your project’s stakeholders are the people or groups who have something to gain (or lose) from your project’s outcome.

For Jurassic Arena the stakeholders can be broken down into two groups, internal and external stake holders.

Internal stakeholders-

These stakeholders are coming from within the house. Internal stakeholders are people or groups within the business, such as team members, managers and executives. in my case this pertains to my lecturers, mentors and Sae institute as an organization.

External stakeholders

External stakeholders are — as you can probably guess — people or groups outside the business. This includes customers, users, suppliers, and investors.

As you can see, stakeholders don’t always work for the project manager. Needless to say, this can add an extra layer of complexity, as you need to be able to communicate with people at all different levels of the business and with varying degrees of engagement, influence, and interest. Notably these will be every one outside of SAE who has given me professional feedback on animations, the group of play testers I have employed to deliver feedback on gameplay, game companies and employers, and ultimately the consumer/player base of the final project.

Now that I have a list of project stakeholders it is important to prioritize them in order to understand where to best invest my resources. the most simple way to do this is using a power/interest grid.

The power/interest grid helps you to identify your key stakeholders by answering two key questions that help you to group them into one of four categories:

• What level of power do they have?: How important is it that they’re happy with the project’s progress and results? How integral are they to the project’s success? How influential are they to the project, to other stakeholders, to the team, and so on?

• What level of interest do they have?: Is this project super important to them, or are they only tangentially connected to it? Is it something they’re directly accountable for? Are they reliant on it for other work or results? Are they opposed to the project or concerned about it in some way?

I am a firm believer that the best way to demonstrate accountability is communication. A consistent cycle of communication between myself and stakeholders individually. The only aspect that varies from stakeholder to stakeholder is the channel of communication, these being social platforms such as discord, work in progress platforms such as Syncsketch, inward facing documentation in the form of a learning journal as well as face to face communication.

Throughout the communication process with any party It is important that I do my best to reduce "noise" and ensure communications from both parties are concise and understood correctly, to this end all communications are documented is some form.

APA

Smith, L. W. (2000). Stakeholder analysis

Project Stakeholders - Who Are They & Why Are They Important? (n.d.). Https://Www.Pmi.Org/. https://www.teamwork.com/project-management-guide/project-stakeholders/

Tiwari, S. (2022, January 25). Communication Cycle - Elements, Importance and Example. Digiaide.Com. https://digiaide.com/communication-cycle/